NoSmoke wrote:Isn't it enough that everyone got weekends, vacation pay, and paid holidays from Union Bartering Agreements that paved the way for it all?

Proud Member of:International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers

No offense NS but by that reasoning then we should thank the Dem's for Slavery and leading the way for the model for low priced commodities and the Democrats KKK for being one of the first Community Action Groups.

While we're at it we should all thank Hitler for giving us cuase to give the Jews an Israeli State...we should thank the Roman Empire for giving us "Coliseums" so we can watch Football on Sunday...shall I go on giving thanks?

"Most" Unions have out lived their usefullness in a global economy and a Federal Labor Realtions Board. Not to mention every state has a Labor board as well. Trust me, unless you rape the bosses daughter or punch him or your supervisor in the face it's damn hard to get fired nowadays.

All you have to do is follow the money...right smack into the Liberal coffers and you don't HAVE ANY say where your Dues go. The Union bosses are no different now than they were when Jimmy Hoffa Sr. was around, nothing but Scum bag Thugs, and very RICH ones at that.

At the turn of the 20th century, business could do what it wanted-- and it did. The result was robber barons, monopolistic gouging, management thugs attacking union organizers, filth in our food, a punishing business cycle, slavery and racial oppression, starvation among the elderly, gunboat diplomacy in support of business interests led by you beliefs.

Chrysler just had to hire back 7 guys, with 1yrs Back PAY for being let go after they were caught drinking and smoking weed on their lunch break. Which btw was against company policy as stated in their handbook...that don't matter, we got's a UNION to go stick up for them.

Yes I thank Unions for giving us laws that protect drunk and Lazy A$$ed Bums!

Business will lock minorities out of jobs and refuse to serve them, or serve them only in degrading ways. Business will create unsafe goods, endanger workers, profiteer in times of crisis, use violence to prevent unionization-- and spend millions on politicians who will remove the people's right to limit these abuses. Thanks to business climate, companies are happily moving jobs abroad, lowering wages, worsening working conditions. The same business climate encourages narcissists to pay themselves handsomely while ruling incompetently, and leads to false accounting, insider trading, and corruption. Businesses create monopolies and cartels when they can manage it; and the first thing monopolies do is raise prices. Businesses can create bureaucracies as impenetrable and money-wasting as any government. Hence uninoism!Private discrimination, for instance, lasted a hundred years; and it wasn't ended by businessmen changing their minds, but by blacks and liberalized organizing.

Northern Maine wrote:Business will lock minorities out of jobs and refuse to serve them, or serve them only in degrading ways. Business will create unsafe goods, endanger workers, profiteer in times of crisis, use violence to prevent unionization-- and spend millions on politicians who will remove the people's right to limit these abuses. Thanks to business climate, companies are happily moving jobs abroad, lowering wages, worsening working conditions. The same business climate encourages narcissists to pay themselves handsomely while ruling incompetently, and leads to false accounting, insider trading, and corruption. Businesses create monopolies and cartels when they can manage it; and the first thing monopolies do is raise prices. Businesses can create bureaucracies as impenetrable and money-wasting as any government. Hence uninoism!

But government controlled monopolies and cartels, and rules(laws) that lock out minorities, and inflated pricing are somehow "better"?

Why? Because the majority voted on it?

Is a D.C. narcissist more moral than a Wall St one?

Yes, thanks to the "business climate", companies are happily moving jobs abroad. Jobs like mine. Who is it that creates the "business environment"? Wall St? Or Congress?

Oh, and I'd like to thank my UNION for bring special attention to my plant by subpoenaing the vice president of the company over a $500 contract signing bonus. Good work. I'm sure wasting his time had nothing to do with putting a target on our backs...

I've worked both union & non & the way I see it there may be some good that comes out of this. The unions that have lost touch with just who they should be helping & why so they just may have to do some soul searching & fly right. On the other hand I don't think it will happen right away because big business at all costs wants to destroy unions but once they believe they once again have total control all the things that the unions of old fought for will be slowly taken away which will just create the resurgence of unions. I have a pension & HC because of unions, how many businesses would have HC without the union, even being union I was real close to being fired a couple of times & my union didn't seem too concerned at the time so I have no love for them but do believe they have a purpose & the average worker is far better off with than without. Not to say there aren't some employers that treat workers right, those that do can normally remain non-union because of it.

Northern Maine wrote:Business will lock minorities out of jobs and refuse to serve them, or serve them only in degrading ways. Business will create unsafe goods, endanger workers, profiteer in times of crisis, use violence to prevent unionization-- and spend millions on politicians who will remove the people's right to limit these abuses. Thanks to business climate, companies are happily moving jobs abroad, lowering wages, worsening working conditions. The same business climate encourages narcissists to pay themselves handsomely while ruling incompetently, and leads to false accounting, insider trading, and corruption. Businesses create monopolies and cartels when they can manage it; and the first thing monopolies do is raise prices. Businesses can create bureaucracies as impenetrable and money-wasting as any government. Hence uninoism!

But government controlled monopolies and cartels, and rules(laws) that lock out minorities, and inflated pricing are somehow "better"?

Why? Because the majority voted on it?

Is a D.C. narcissist more moral than a Wall St one?

Yes, thanks to the "business climate", companies are happily moving jobs abroad. Jobs like mine. Who is it that creates the "business environment"? Wall St? Or Congress

Oh, and I'd like to thank my UNION for bring special attention to my plant by subpoenaing the vice president of the company over a $500 contract signing bonus. Good work. I'm sure wasting his time had nothing to do with putting a target on our backs...

Everything is blamed on the government according to your ideology;The advantage of single-villain ideologies is obvious: in any given situation you never have to think hard to find out the culprit. The disadvantages, however, are worse: you can't see your primary target clearly-- hatred is a pair of dark glasses-- and you can't see the problems with anything else. It's a habit of mind that renders libertarianism unfalsifiable, and thus irrelevant to the world. Everything gets blamed on one institution; and because we have no real-world example where that agency is absent, the claims can't be tested.

jpete wrote:Do I have a choice (assuming we're not talking about your "like it or lump it" false dichotomy) of dealing with the government as opposed to say, any particular company?

Did Steve Jobs send men with guns to force people to buy iPhones?

You can spew all the words your heart desires the plain truth remains.

Government writes the rules that the rest of us are expected to play by. If the game is a mess, whom should I blame?

If I don't like the rules in the NFL, should I stop playing baseball?

Who else would you like me to blame NM?

If government is bad, why not do away with it entirely? Why not have no government at all, as in Somalia? That works pretty well, doesn't it? Africa may be unimaginably remote; what about 19th century America? Didn't we try laissez-faire capitalism, and wasn't it a disaster? Filth in our meat, shantytowns, racism, 'No Irish need apply', company towns, union-busting goons, monopolies, corruption scandals, a punishing business cycle, old folks living in poverty, failing banks, Boss Tweed, gunboat diplomacy.

The solution to most of those problems was government: food and drug regulation; anti-trust laws; banking regulations; labor laws; the Fed; Social Security. We can hardly understand why many Russians want to go back to Communism, and yet we seem to want to go back to laissez-faire capitalism.When you really have a bad government, it's obvious that you need reform, not anarchy.Politics would be much less entertaining, but a hell of a lot more rational, if once the "government is bad" rhetoric started flying, people started asking questions like these: What government services do you plan to cut? What exactly do those programs do? How well do they work? How much do they cost now? Who stands to benefit from the proposed cuts? Are these cuts a smokescreen for increasing spending somewhere else? What's Congress actually doing (as opposed to what it says it's doing)?

In short, be skeptical: not just about government, but about business, and about the motives of the people who want to get government off their backs. What do they want to do once it's gone?

Shantytowns? Have you seen Detroit lately? A shantytown might look good. Hell, come to Providence. Before the PD went through and cut up their tents, we had a tent city in the shadow of an abandoned highway overpass. Up until a couple months ago, some woman had a "house" made from a blue tarp on the sidewalk down by the hospital.

Aren't we living in a punishing business cycle now? And Helicopter Ben said yesterday he's out of bullets. Now what?

Racism obviously will always exist to some degree.

Failing banks? How many have failed just this year? A few hundred? The ones that SHOULD fail for their poor and criminal choices are deemed "too big to fail".

I can understand why some Russians want to go back to Communism. Because some Russians did OK under it. Others are likely scared of trying something new.

What I can't understand is when Americans have a document like the Declaration of Independence which reminds them of the human disposition to "suffer evil while evils are sufferable" they don't look around, see all kinds of evil and then continue to go on suffering.

We have the ability to make things better, we just choose not to. We slit our wrists, and slip comfortably under the warm bath water of familiar systems.

Shantytowns? Have you seen Detroit lately? A shantytown might look good. Hell, come to Providence. Before the PD went through and cut up their tents, we had a tent city in the shadow of an abandoned highway overpass. Up until a couple months ago, some woman had a "house" made from a blue tarp on the sidewalk down by the hospital.

Aren't we living in a punishing business cycle now? And Helicopter Ben said yesterday he's out of bullets. Now what?

Racism obviously will always exist to some degree.

Failing banks? How many have failed just this year? A few hundred? The ones that SHOULD fail for their poor and criminal choices are deemed "too big to fail".

I can understand why some Russians want to go back to Communism. Because some Russians did OK under it. Others are likely scared of trying something new.

What I can't understand is when Americans have a document like the Declaration of Independence which reminds them of the human disposition to "suffer evil while evils are sufferable" they don't look around, see all kinds of evil and then continue to go on suffering.

We have the ability to make things better, we just choose not to. We slit our wrists, and slip comfortably under the warm bath water of familiar systems.

Again, all-or-nothing thinking generally goes with intellectual fraud. If a system is untestable, it's because its proponents fear testing. By contrast, I'm confident enough in liberal/conservative and scientific values that I'm happy to see even partial adoption. Even a little freedom is better than dictatorship. Even a little science is better than ideology

Laissez -faire--you are correct it was not-- the United States followed the Whig tradition of Economic nationalism

I'm all for experimentation; that's how we learn. Create a libertarian state. But run it as a proper experiment. Start small-scale. Establish exactly how your claims will be tested: per capita income? median income? life expectancy? property value? surveys on happiness? Set up a control: e.g. begin with two communities as close as we can get them in size, initial wealth, resources, and culture, one following liberlism/consrevatism, one following libertarianism. Abide by the results-- no changing the goalposts if the liberals or the conservatives happen to "win".

The best we can do is attempt something like the Free State Project up in New Hampshire and even then they are planning to suppress it as the Keene PD just got an armored personnel carrier through Homeland Security.

I'm not sure I'd call Keene the "front lines of the War on Terror" so other than liberty activists, I'm not sure who'll be seeing the wrong end of that thing.

The best we can do is attempt something like the Free State Project up in New Hampshire and even then they are planning to suppress it as the Keene PD just got an armored personnel carrier through Homeland Security.

I'm not sure I'd call Keene the "front lines of the War on Terror" so other than liberty activists, I'm not sure who'll be seeing the wrong end of that thing.

Again, all-or-nothing thinking generally goes with intellectual fraud. If a system is untestable, it's because its proponents fear testing. By contrast, I'm confident enough in liberal/conservative and scientific values that I'm happy to see even partial adoption. Even a little freedom is better than dictatorship. Even a little science is better than ideology

I'm even willing to look at partial tests. If an ideology is really better than others at producing general prosperity, then following it partially should produce partially better results. Compare a partly socialist system (e.g. Tanzania) to a partly capitalist one (e.g. Kenya). (Kenya looked a lot better.) If the tests are partial, of course, we'll want more of them; but human experience is pretty broad.

jpete wrote:You're right, "all or nothing" is bad yet you keep forcing me to choose between the two. Either whatever it is we have now, or anarchy.

I suppose "even a little freedom is better than a dictatorship" as being able to move freely about the yard is better than being in solitary confinement but aren't you still a prisoner?

Our dilemma as prisoners: Two men are arrested, but the police do not have enough information for a conviction. The police separate the two men, and offer both the same deal: if one testifies against his partner (defects/betrays), and the other remains silent (cooperates with/assists his partner), the betrayer goes free and the one that remains silent gets a one-year sentence. If both remain silent, both are sentenced to only one month in jail on a minor charge. If each 'rats out' the other, each receives a three-month sentence. Each prisoner must choose either to betray or remain silent; the decision of each is kept secret from his partner until the sentence is announced. What should they do?